Your energetic, enthusiastic, and supportive personality fits in perfectly in a creative and versatile administrative environment. Well developed interpersonal, organizational, analytical, decision making, negotiating, problem solving, verbal, and written communication skills are your forte. Managing multiple projects of high priority is a challenge that you welcome in a fast paced quickly evolving environment. Interacting with various disciplines within the company is a pleasure for you and resolving problems and creating solutions comes as second nature.

A Typical Day

Your morning begins with the orientation process of a new Tribe member that you helped relocate from Europe. The excitement that they have in joining Red 5 is contagious and you mirror that excitement in your enthusiastic presentation as you dive deeply into Red 5’s comprehensive flexible benefit plans, retirement programs, profit sharing plan, long term disability, medical, prescription drug, dental, vision, life insurance, gym membership, the list goes on and on. You present the importance of Red 5’s culture and what that truly means. How do we define ourselves? What differentiates us from the rest of the gaming community? You’re already connected with the new Tribe member, having worked diligently on scheduling his/her travel, scheduling phone screens and onsite interviews, working on any immigration/visa issues with our immigration attorney, and discussing the finer points of his/her benefits. Finding the time at the end of the day to log into Firefall and make your way into the open world, you realize the importance of the talented and creative Tribe members that you support on a day-to-day basis.

Who You Work With the Most

You’re fortunate to work with all departments at Red 5 including Operations, Design, Programming, Art, Production, IT, Video, Administration, and Talent Acquisition. Working with the administration team, you support all employees in issues regarding HR such as on-boarding, PTO, and benefits. Additionally, you work with several of our outside vendors including our immigration attorney, benefits administrator, and our relocation services.

What You’ve Done Before

• 2-3 years of experience with benefits, employee relations, and on-boarding
• General employee needs such as inquiries, form requests, policy interpretation, and procedure clarification
• Experience with immigration issues as it relates to employment
• Excellent interpersonal skills and unyielding enthusiasm in a creative team environment
• Demonstrated exceptional verbal and written communication skills
• Previous experience in arranging travel and coordinating with candidates for their interviews and relocation
• Problem solving and conflict resolution skills
• Maintained confidential documentation and information on sensitive issues
• Assisted in conducting new hire orientation programs
• Passion for games

Environments, characters, weapons, vehicles, and props all fascinate you. While researching various environmental styles from history, you think about ways to incorporate them into your work. Massively multiplayer online games excite you, because you get to create buildings and other structures that meld different architectural styles. From futuristic spaceports and beyond, your creations shape the perceptions of the players of the game, instantly conveying to them a message about the zone they’ve entered and the gameplay they are about to experience. Your clear and concise rendering skills make others appreciate your work, as does your excellent line quality. Whenever the opportunity arises, you enjoy working with a team of other concept artists to create amazing visuals and ideas that bring the world to life.

A Typical Day

You begin your day by meeting with the art lead to discuss the design needs of a new zone you’ll be working on this week. Other concept artists are also working on the zone, but your purview encompasses the buildings, bridges, and other structures. Once you’re done getting a feel for what’s required, you enjoy spending a few hours researching architectural styles that might tie into the general theme of the geographical region. You sketch out a few ideas to present at an art and design meeting later on in the day. That meeting also gives you the opportunity to hear feedback on a few of the building designs you presented last week. The rest of the team really liked your stuff but wants you to emphasize a particular element within the drawings, since it fits well with the concept of the environment. Not only will this strengthen the overall concept of the zone but it’ll make the 3D modeler’s job easier once he gets started converting your work into a playable game element.

Who You Work With the Most

Communication is very important. The game designers are creating the story and background for the game you’re working on, so you need to be able to understand what they’re talking about and turn their words into pictures. Since you’ve got the art knowledge, you can suggest ideas that may not have occurred to them. Between you, the concept team and the art lead, you’ll shape the presentation of the world. Finally, the feedback loop circles all the way around between you and the modeling team. No matter how great an environmental concept is, it won’t do much good if they can’t render it in the game.

What You’ve Done Before

• Strong digital illustration skills using Adobe Photoshop
• Excellent draftsmanship
• Knowledge of environments, characters, weapons, vehicles, and props
• Ability to develop and adapt to a range of art styles
• Excellent communication skills
• Passion for games

You’re a nerd. Not just any nerd, a nerd who likes to get in front of other people and scream how awesome it is to be a nerd. You love talking about games and you love talking to gamers. So much so that you try to involve yourself in every gaming community you hear about. You love writing blog posts, taking pictures, making videos, posting on forums, and commenting on social media. And you’d love to do all of this for the Firefall community.

A Typical Day

The first thing you do in the morning is check up on the Firefall forums to see what the latest buzz is. You answer some questions and moderate a few threads before diving back into the details of the new fansite program you’re creating. Afterwards, you spend some time pulling metrics on last week’s marketing efforts for the weekly update meeting. When all that’s done, you chat it up with marketing and the rest of the community team to decide what the next week’s content is going to be. Then you head back into the forums and scour the web for any additional comments you need to respond to. You cap off the day by following up with the fan sites to see if there’s anything they need in the next few days.

Who You Work With the Most

You will spend a lot of your time interacting with the Firefall community and working directly with the EU community manager and community team in California. You will end up working with everyone in the company at various stages in order to create new and exciting content for the community.

What You’ve Done Before

• 2+ years experience in a customer support or community role, with demonstrable focus on creating content
• Solid understanding of web and video media, social networking, and the latest community tools and techniques
• Experience working with at least one CMS (Content Management System) and commercial forum software such as vBulletin
• Strong excitement for online communities, gaming, social media, and web content
• Fluent in English and either German or French
• Passionate about Firefall, the Firefall community, and online shooters

No one needs to look over your shoulder to attain the highest levels of customer satisfaction as you pride yourself in making sure you have the staff you need when you need them, they have the right people working on the issues at hand around the clock, and everyone is being kept up to date on what is happening and why. Although there isn’t a single problem that affects the platform that you can’t identify and, when appropriate, handle yourself, your passion is in making sure your team has all the documentation and training required to tackle those challenges any time, day or night. Your experience being part of teams that keep operations humming, your internal and external customers happy, and your understanding of what it takes to build and manage a strong and agile team differentiate you from the rest of the pack. Utilizing this knowledge of what it takes to run an efficient NOC and in cooperation with other departments across the organization, you and your team will develop, document, and implement the policies, processes, and procedures that will ensure that millions of players around the globe can experience the very best of what the Red 5 Studios platform has to offer.

A Typical Day

The NOC is your domain. You love it here. It’s the nerve center of the operation with staff, around the clock, making sure nothing happens on the platform that they aren’t aware of anywhere around the globe. After a quick meeting with the Operations Director, you sit down with your team and discuss new features rolling out to the product later in the week and work together to come up with a strategy to identify and deal with potential customer impact. Later, after reviewing the daily reports, you meet with one of your team about an overnight call from someone panicking in Asia and commend him for how quickly he was able to reassure them that the issue would be resolved with minimal impact, his ability to drill down into the report, and how efficiently he was able to troubleshoot and resolve the issue with other members of the Operations team. Always looking for new talent, you spend some time reviewing candidates who have the right skills and who you feel might be a good cultural fit for Red 5 and the Firefall team. Before you leave, you scan the NOC to make sure everything is running like clockwork and everyone has the things they need for the remainder of their shift, check the schedule to make sure you will have the after hour coverage needed to ensure another smooth night, and check one last time with QA and Dev to make sure there aren’t going to be any surprises. Even if there are, you know your team has it covered.

Who You Work With the Most

You’ve got your team and that camaraderie keeps you busy. As the company’s first line of defense, you work closely with the product rollout team to plan for new features going out to the platform. You also have a strong relationship with the Rangers, our customer support team, QA, and Development, whom you work with nearly every day. Our company doesn’t believe in barriers, so you speak directly with the people who have the answers you need no matter what their role within the organization. Finally, in order to make sure your team has all the information and training it needs to be efficient, and as a key piece of the Operations team, you will work closely with the Systems, Network, and Database staff on process and procedure to keep everything running as smooth as silk.

What You Will Be Doing

• Oversee day-to-day efforts to monitor and maintain the Red 5 platform
• Organize staff to ensure effective 24×7x365 team coverage
• Handle scheduling, training, performance, and personnel issues for NOC staff and leadership
• Establish, track, and report on departmental objectives to ensure organizational goals are met
• Build and maintain a quality-focused service culture for the NOC
• Draft timelines of event and communicate status of ongoing activities
• Monitor both systems and network performance through the use of various network management tools
• Investigate, troubleshoot, and triage both production and non-production platform issues
• Perform various after hours installation and configuration tasks both on systems and software applications
• Develop, document, and implement policies, processes, and procedures, both within the NOC and in cooperation with other departments
• Develop tools to improve support processes

What You’ve Done Before

• 5+ years of working experience in a large scale call center, help desk, or NOC
• 3+ years management experience, with the ability to efficiently lead and manage people and projects
• Excellent leadership and interpersonal skills, to effectively manage employees and interface with other departments
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, and a demonstrated aptitude for communicating complex technical concepts and information in straightforward terms
• Demonstrated competency in technical writing, including various documentation, management reports, and metrics
• Strong technical proficiency in troubleshooting, managing, and monitoring networks and server hardware and software
• Functional knowledge of Unix-based (Linux) systems
• Experience troubleshooting complex systems and applications on Unix-based (Linux) platforms
• Strong self-motivation and the ability to work with minimal supervision
• Exceptional organization and time management skills
• Ability to coach and train team members to enable professional development
• Customer service mentality: calm and customer-oriented communication
• Hours must be flexible and may be rotational as determined by the needs of the business
• Passion for gaming

What You’ve Hopefully Done

• MMO support experience
• Ability to write scripts in an administrative language (Python, Ruby, or Shell)
• Experience with Ubuntu Linux
• Experience working with systems deployed on AWS infrastructure

You are an enigma wrapped inside a mystery inside a stereotype. You are the enigmatic, charismatic, charming hardcore gamer. Not only do you love blasting faces in the latest shooters and questing for glory in the next MMO, you love sharing those experiences online and in-person. You are able to stand up in front of a crowd and whip them into a frenzy for what is about to be shown. And you do it all with a smile on your face and a skip in your step. People may even say you’re too happy and that something might just be wrong with you.

A Typical Day

You’ve just flown into town for a local gaming event. You need to check-in to the hotel, grab your gear, and head over to the convention center to check on the setup of the booth space. After verifying everything is running smoothly, you call up everyone else on the team to have a quick meeting regarding the plan for the show. Day of the show you are the master of ceremony for the entire event. You’re shaking hands and kissing babies making everyone feel comfortable and at ease while pumping up the crowd into a excited fervor. You meet with some fans of the game and do a couple of interviews before wrapping up the day with a rallying cry and t-shirt grab.

Who You Work With the Most

You spend the majority of your time on the road heading to various events. You work closely with event staff, eSports team, and the community team to make sure that everything goes off without a hitch. When you’re not traveling, you’re in the office interacting with the community on the forums, in IRC, and on video. You work directly with customers, the dev team, and marketing in all aspects of your job.

What You’ve Done Before

• Experience working in online and offline communities interacting with customers and acting as host
• Complete comfort speaking in public and making presentations
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Great personality and approachability
• Working knowledge of online community management
• Extreme passion for games, especially shooters and MMOs

You work hard to make the player’s job easier. Even though every dedicated player will want to customize his or her UI, it’s up to you to present an attractive and intuitive interface that gets people playing the game long enough to become dedicated players. Part artist, part designer, and part programmer, the game will be presented to the world through your eyes.

A Typical Day

You just finished up with a new targeting reticle for your favorite player race that makes the HUD for those players feel very distinct and pull them deeper into the game world, and you’re looking forward to the team’s reaction when it arrives in the new game build this afternoon. Your next task will be to design and mock up a UI for the new resource system the designers have created. You’ve already crafted some icons and designed a way to display the information in a clean and non-distracting manner, but need to check in with the team and be sure the theme conveys all the necessary information. Your design incorporates explicit color choices, unique animated elements, and distinct icons that make it eye-catching and attractive … but also informative and functional.

Who You Work With the Most

Because you have art, scripting, and design skills, your work overlaps with nearly every department. You’ll keep abreast of all the different design features going into the game, learning about weapons, abilities, and character functionality as they are developed. Quite often, you’ll contribute ideas based on your understanding of the interface that may not have occurred to anyone else. Once the design goal is finalized you’ll craft the UI art, working with the Art Director to fit the elements into the game’s overall look and feel. Finally, you implement the functioning interface through XML and LUA scripting and other tools provided by the programming team.

What You’ve Done Before

• Graphic Design experience in web or print
• Strong sense of layout, typography and information design
• Good illustrative abilities at the pixel and icon level
• Experience with Macromedia Flash for UI prototyping
• Comfortable with scripting languages
• Experience with LUA and XML a plus
• Experience with usability testing
• Passion for games and MMOs

You love gaming communities, and you understand how they work, what they care about and how they respond to situations. You can write a terrific press release and you create infectious excitement amongst gamers everywhere, whether through forum posts, personal emails, or in-person events.  You are both thick-skinned and flame-retardant.  You love games… live games, and are games.  Being the frontline interface with the gaming community for a brand new game is extremely exciting to you.  

A Typical Day

Today begins by spending a few minutes checking the forums and seeing what the community is talking about.  You hear about a bug, delete or close a few posts, and notice a 5 page post with feedback on some new content.  You send the bug off to development, and start to organize the feedback.  Half-way through, you get a call and are asked to edit some patch notes and put together a press release & post for them.  Afterwards, you go to a website meeting to schedule and plan content updates over the next month.  In the afternoon, you have an exciting meeting with the design team where you get a few community questions answered, pass on a few suggestions, one of which the designers want to implement immediately.  You then sit down and write a quick blog entry to share some of the answers you found.  You cap off your day by having an online interview with a fansite.

Who You Work With the Most

You work every day with the fans of our game.  You also work closely with development so that you understand things going on in the game as well as they do.  Your day to day work is highly interwoven with that of the web team, and you also coordinate efforts with PR.

What You’ve Done Before

• 2+ years of being either a fansite webmaster of a large, successful site, or a community manager of an MMO
• Excellent writing skills
• Great personality, especially in online form
• Working knowledge of how websites work
• Extreme passion for games and MMOs
• Fluent in English and either French or German, and knowledgeable about the gaming communities in both cultures.

Laguna Hills, CA – December 15, 2011 – Red 5 Studios™ announces the launch of its first professional cosplay program, aimed to encourage and inspire the cosplay community by sponsoring passionate and creative individuals. Well-known cosplayer, Crystal Graziano, has been selected for Red 5’s first yearlong sponsorship. She was chosen from a pool of top cosplayers for her previous quality work and passion for videogame roles.

As part of the sponsorship, Red 5 will pay for all of Crystal Graziano’s cosplay activities and unique costume creations for one year – along with supplying professional photography and photoshop sessions. In addition, Crystal Graziano will get to fill the role of Firefall’s heroic female protagonist, “Mourningstar”, at key conventions and promotions throughout 2012.

“Because Firefall’s sci-fi world and story are so rich and colorful, we see there being a lot of interest from artists and designers,” said Red 5 CEO and Chief Creative Officer, Mark Kern. “Developers should embrace these individuals because they add so much to the universe, both in-game and out. This program is our way of showing appreciation and support for what they contribute to the game and community.”

Red 5 has once again called upon the masterful craftsmanship of award-winning Hollywood FX artist, Steve Wang, to create the Mourningstar costume. Complete with lights and effects, this epic cosplay will bring an unprecedented level of realism and detail to Firefall’s Mourningstar character. Red 5 has released a video showing the initial fitting for Steve Wang’s costume at the follow link: http://bit.ly/firefallcosplay.

Red 5 Studios’ upcoming free-to-play open world shooter, Firefall, is currently running the first stage of its exclusive beta – planned to roll-out through 2012. Players can sign-up for the chance to be invited into the beta and meet Firefall’s enthusiastic community at the official homepage: http://www.firefallthegame.com.

About Red 5 Studios
Red 5 Studios is an online game developer located in California, founded by Mark Kern, former team lead for World of Warcraft. Red 5 Studios is dedicated to bringing together millions of gamers across the world by creating immersive worlds, intriguing stories and compelling characters. They believe that online games and persistent worlds are the future of video games. Visit www.red5studios.com for more information.

Firefall, Red 5 Studios and all associated logos and designs are trademarks or registered trademarks of Red 5 Studios, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

You look at massively multiplayer online games as a collection of systems and code. You love watching players encounter the new features and systems you’ve written, allowing them to interact with the world and perhaps even create new things within it.  Item creation, guild systems, spells and abilities – anything the players can interact with is in your purview. During the design process you’re all about prototyping game systems, and both before and after release you want to make sure the logic on the server that governs these systems is sound.  Building upon the fundamental server architecture, you and the other gameplay programmers code the systems players will utilize over and over again.

A Typical Day

You spend your morning working with the design team going over a prototype for a player character inventory management system. It’s important you determine what underlying technology is necessary if you’re going to make the system work. After coming up with a basic plan you meet with the server and AI engineers to make certain the technology groundwork exists to implement the feature. You outline a basic specification and the wiki and pass it around for input. While you are waiting on feedback, you hit the bug database and knock off the last remaining issues with the last system you implemented.

Who You Work With the Most

You collaborate with the other programmers before implementing any new features or procedural changes, trying to get the best idea on how to tackle any issue. You also spend a lot of time working with the design team. You’re part game designer yourself, but with your programming knowledge you’re able to ask questions and steer the game designers toward feature solutions that take advantage of your existing code and technology. When they propose a feature, you can come back with mechanical solution suggestions that make sense, both to the programmers and the designers.

What You’ve Done Before

• 3-5+ years C/C++ programming experience
• 5+ years game development experience
• Experience working closely with designers
• Excellent and self-driven optimizer
• Passion for games

Where you’re concerned, no database is ever fast enough or reliable enough. You enjoy designing and tuning databases to meet the unique requirements of a massive team-based action shooter, a MMO like nothing else on the market, and all its various components. Working with the latest in open source database technology, you craft custom solutions that are flexible, adaptable and fast. In the end, it’s all about collecting and organizing raw, untamed data and coaxing out the most valuable information; coming up with the tools that let even the least database-savvy members of your team view the data they need to see and organize it in the manner necessary to accomplish their missions. If you can do all that and keep the data secure and flowing unhindered, you’re happy.

A typical day

You’ve just tracked down the query from the latest game feature that, under certain high load conditions, was tanking the database. After a few hours, you think you’ve optimized it so that it not only addresses the problem but improves performance significantly. Now it’s time to sit down with the senior server programmer and develop a test case to make sure your fix works. Afterwards, you start to work on the bots that will stress test the databases by simulating player load.

Who you work with the most

The Senior Server Programmer and the Director of Technical Operations work together with you to architect fast custom database solutions using open-source database tech. Everything has to be custom tailored to the unique needs of your MMO’s database traffic, but that’s what keeps things interesting.

What You’ve Done Before

• 5+ years hands-on experience as a MySQL DBA on Unix-based (Linux) system in a mission critical environment (DataCenter including 24×7 operations)
• Intimate knowledge of MySQL architecture, best-practices and tuning philosophies
• Strong knowledge and hands on experience related to mission critical backup and recovery
• Advance Linux or Linux-like systems administration, performance and filesystem tuning
• Production experience implementing and managing replication
• Able to write scripts in an administrative language (Python, Ruby, or Shell)
• Proven ability to work well in a crisis and under pressure
• Excellent oral and written communications skills
• Passion for gaming